'Marketing is becoming more important than content in the indie game market,' the developer points out.
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'Indie games ' are games produced and released by individuals and small developers with great creativity and useful tools. Among the indie games that developers independently distribute without relying on sales companies (publishers), there are many titles that have made big hits worldwide, such as 'Minecraft ' and ' UNDERTALE'. The developer of such an indie game points out that 'marketing is becoming more important in the indie game market as the number of game titles released is increasing explosively year by year.'
Infinitroid --Did I just waste 3 years? --Dev Blog
https://infinitroid.com/blog/posts/did_i_just_waste_3_years
Luke's Rogue-like and Metroid Cordova near has released an early access version of the action game 'Infinitroid' which is a combination of in November 2017. Luke was thinking of distributing the Early Access version on his site and eventually using a game distribution platform such as Steam when the official version was completed.
You can see what kind of game 'Infinitroid' is by watching the following movie.
Infinitroid Dev Trailer (Rogue-lite Metroidvania & Sci-fi Platformer) --YouTube
It seems that 1016 people visited the site within 4 months after Luke released the game, but only 4 'Infinitroid' were sold. What's more, the sales of these four books were purchased by people who had registered accounts on Luke's site before the release and could play 'Infinitroid' for free to support Luke's development. Yes. In other words, no one appeared in 4 months after registering a new account and purchasing the Early Access version.
'Maybe I wasted three years of development,' Luke said, pointing out that the indie game market is bloated behind this situation.
Since 2014, just before the development of 'Infinitroid' started, the number of indie games centered on Steam has increased explosively. The graph below summarizes the number of newly released games by year, but you can see that an order of magnitude has been released since 2014 and 7672 games were released in 2017.
According to Mr. Luke, not only the number of games but also the release interval per team is shortening, and the development speed of the game is rapidly increasing. Among the game titles released at a low price, there are many 'those that have just been released indiscriminately without regard to quality', and inevitably the quality of the game and the price per game will decline, and the market will be saturated. The fact that it is becoming a state is also mentioned as a problem.
On the other hand, some titles have been released that have been made into great games through development efforts. However, there are so many indie games released that even with the same promotion as before, they are buried in so many games that they are quickly forgotten, Luke said.
The same point was made by people other than Luke, and Cliff Harris of Positech Games said, 'Even if you make an indie game, you will fail and you will lose money. Indie game developers are no longer in the poor. I have no choice but to do it, 'he said in his blog.
Luke said, 'Of course money isn't everything. It's fun to make and share games. But I want to invest my time to make everyone play and have fun and make some money. Was. ' And now, Luke says, he's set aside creativity and only considered marketing and game brush-ups, keeping the following points in mind:
-To be able to release and declare the completion of the project in a satisfactory level with minimal work.
・ Moderate development and concentrate on marketing. You should lower prices, promote, try free test play, and decide what to do next based on the results.
・ Take the project itself as a pure hobby. It may take years to complete the project, but if you feel like it, working on it may end up with something cool and unique.
• Give players a moral gaming experience by setting play times so that the game is not overly addictive so as to benefit the player's life.
-Even if it is a commercially unsuccessful work, try to release the finished product by adding / improving graphics, music, level design, etc.
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